(🧵) One assumption about disinformation that needs revision is the idea that older voters are more prone to believe disinformation.

Not only does new empirical work suggests this is no longer the case, other factors that usually determine the outcome of elections more than disinformation appear to be in question now - like who raises more money, Trump actually raised less than Harris despite running his campaign for several times longer.

In fact, if you look at the last few elections, what seems to happen is that whenever the economy is good, people elect a Republican President, and whenever it's bad, they elect a Democratic one. In addition, a picture of what predisposes people to believe in disinfo/misinfo, as well as where they get that from, starts to illustrate what policy debaters might call "harms" - like, a clear picture of a (hopefully) addressable problem.

I hypothesized that disinformation belief was like having a disease that you never knew you had, until a stressor in your environment brought it out - a diathesis-stress phenomenon

This recent study gives some weight to that theory

If you can stand to be clinical about things - which one needs to for survival purposes, though I understand if some people aren't there yet emotionally - this is an interesting equation we're seeing as far as recess appointments.

A thread (🧵) First, let me answer the dumb questions if you're just, like, afraid to ask or not from here; this is actually something AI is pretty decent for

Dumb questions, that is

A really interesting filter to understand the '24 election that I haven't seen people use is the Ukraine aid bill fight, which turned into the Lankford/Sinema/Murphy immigration bill fight.

From November 2023 - this time last year, actually - to April of 2024, when Johnson finally caved and passed the exact same Ukraine aid bill he'd been holding out for an immigration deal on, it seemed insane to outside observers that one House Representative from Louisiana could hold up the entire country's foreign policy.
🧵
The Ukraine aid bill fight, and the utter disaster caused by how long it took, exposed three flaws in the American system, I'd argue:

1. hyper-partisan, "tribal" politics where no matter what, your team must win, even if it means starving Ukraine of aid for months, or failing to act on a "border invasion" that you yourself hyped up the urgency of for months,

2. thorough-going corruption and 'infestation' by domestic & foreign money - in Johnson's case, what people don't realize about the American Ethane matter is that American Ethane gave money to a lot of Louisiana Republicans.

That is, one of the reasons why it's fallacious bordering on silly to insist that American Ethane proves Johnson was manipulated to kill Ukraine aid, is that it was years before he became Speaker - and while everyone around Johnson was also paid, they didn't play the same role in killing Ukraine aid.

Johnson is 'exonerated', in other words, by the sheer, banal commonness of taking Russian money

Went for a walk with mom, talked about what I'm going to do now that the election's over.

She said, remember Phil? Phil is a Trump supporter my stepfather knew. I wonder how he's doing, she said.

Phil is, as I recall, a paradox; he's both unabashedly racist and willing to believe in whatever bad guy Trump pointed him towards, he's also someone who's been there at hard moments for our family.

(🧵) So I said, I'd bet he's pretty happy right now. He's probably cheering and feels like he was right all along. It's like this joke about this political party, it's called the Leopard Eating Faces party, right? And everyone votes for it because...

Because no one thinks the leopard will ever eat their face, mom said.

Exactly, I said. Phil is going to realize at some point that the leopard is going to eat his face, and you know what I realized? Why is it my job to stop that?

Sure, OK, let's say America is an empire on the decline.

There's plus sides to that though. It's not as simple as all that.

One, we're in an increasingly interconnected era when being hegemon from behind the barrel of a nuclear gun pointed at the head of the world itself really makes us more of a target than anything beneficial.

We had Trump on the trigger of that gun for four years. We know that he actually contemplated nuking North Korea in his first term thanks to Mark Kelly.
🧵 From a national priorities point of view, I'm actually OK with us taking on a more sustainable role in world affairs than "omnipotent world police subject to occasional fits of nuclear fascism".

You wanna call that "imperial decline", fine by me. I'll call it "saner foreign policy" and everybody's happy
nbcnews.com/politics/donal…

I think I've seen enough people asking the question, and gotten enough direct messages asking about it, that it's time to bring this one back out.

OK, folks, settle in.

It's time for the "I Think I Want To Get A Gun" thread.

(🧵) I'm not going to tell you to do that or not to do that. For starters, I don't think I'm going to be able to stop you.

Also, I don't know what kind of situation you're in, and situations that people get into stopped being predictable around, say, 2020.

I wouldn't arrogate to myself the role to dictate what's right for you, but I would counsel you to consider a few basic statistical facts, right off the bat:

Realize, your gun is significantly more likely to be used in a suicide or an accident than it is to be used in a "good shoot". Handgun ownership is associated with drastically heightened suicide risk, especially in men; and the vast majority of suicide attempts are fatal.

If you're having trouble, or need to talk to someone, call or text 988 - that's the national suicide hotline.

Merely owning a gun is defying the laws of statistical gravity; gravity has this way of catching up to you and turning you into a statistic.

You ever been shot? I have.

It taught me something about courage, and about sudden, unexpected events I'll tell you.

See, here's the thing about thinking things through while you're in pain and think you're about to die: it's really hard. Even (I suspect) 2+2 math is hard.

🧵 Another thing a lot of people don't realize is that although small-arms ammo like .223 REM/5.56mm NATO can cause severe cavitation injuries, in other cases it's surprisingly non-lethal.

Everyone expects from movies that when you're shot, you die. That's not always true.

Let me piggyback on this excellent thread by pointing out something that should really shape more voting decisions than it does

You may think as a male voter "abortion is messy and religious, I don't know if I should vote on it"

OK then let's talk social indicators like IMR
🧵

https://twitter.com/Info_Rosalie/status/1852921202567688416

There is, I want to emphasize again, absolutely nothing mystical, special or nefarious here.

What I am saying is, if you are trying to figure people out, a good place to start in characterizing the place you are dealing with is social indicators like infant mortality rate.

Here is a thread version of this video explaining why @HackingButLegal's chain of logic used to arrive at her assertion that Ryan Wesley Routh was a false flag/psy op was, in my opinion, so very, very stupid.

Bottom line up front: Jackie makes tall claims but has real short evidence when you look at it, and she defends it by kicking up a fuss whenever someone questions her. Sopeople who don’t look too close think she’s in the right.

Two issues with that, one is, even if you think you’re on the good side, you’re still polluting the conversation with untruth. And two, as see is, Singh obfuscates, blusters and bullies, but when you really scratch the surface on it… there's not much there. This is normally not even on the top 10 list of problems but Harris is up in the polls, and this might be a way to put out some resources to fact-check, so let’s do it.

Additionally, up front, I should mention the argumentative burden that Jackie and I have. Jackie depends upon a series of interrelated ideas to build the idea that a conspiracy theory, essentially, may be plausible at our current state of knowledge about the second attempted Trump assassination.

The test I ask you to apply as you read with me is this: is Singh stating something that can be assessed as plausibly true and logically coherent?

Really? This is it? This is the JD Vance dossier that Iran hacked that no one wanted to publish?

One, this is a hideously ordinary oppo file; I'm going to straight-up guess here that there wasn't even any attempt to insert misinfo into this mixture because it's so obvious

1/6 Two, look how Republicans realized that he had painfully stupid positions on childless people and women generally and still picked him

They realized, for instance, surprise surprise, he's against childcare assistance for low income people

Four lessons I've absorbed from involvement in political discourse these past eight years at various levels:

1) I did competitive debate in high school and ran a debate startup as an adult, so I enjoy argument and debate, but I really, really, really rarely ever engage in it. This is as much due to lack of people capable of engaging in dispassionate good-faith debate as it is the inappropriacy of actual point-by-point debate as a tool for most forms of outreach.

People just don't have the note-taking skills capable of tracking an actual debate or attention span for more than 5-7 items in short-term memory - and that is nothing curmudgeonly about, like, how dumb people are these days, hurr durr.

It's more about debate. Like, this way of reading evidence - in order to be able to accommodate more evidence into an argument - is the same way I learned to do it, which is the same way my debate coach learned to do it, and near as I can figure out, it's been that way since somewhere between the 1960s to the 1980s depending on who you ask.

It's more like you have a higher burden not to add to the info-glut that everyone has to cope with.
wsj.com/video/this-deb… 2) most of what people consider "debate" is debate the same way that what people do in nightclubs is "dance"; there's absolutely no question that it's certainly a form of dance, and that it's fine and even really good by itself to do things like dance occasionally with no concern for how it looks.

But if you look at ballet, or the way that dance has evolved in the late 20th century and early 21st, it's recognizably different and in some ways finer than these other acts we group under "dance".

This is also the case with debate; if you want to call online arguments resolved through, essentially popularity and sophistry contests a debate, that's fine, but the way that lawyers, or for that matter high-level NDT, CEDA or high-school policy debaters argue is recognizably different and in many ways, I'd argue, finer.

If you assert that some kind of psy-op or staged assassination event is going on with the would-be Trump assassin (the second one, not the first) you have a pretty tall hill to climb on that, and it quite easily falls apart when facts like this emerge.

I believe this may be a very, very special level of stupid right here.

Let me walk you through what you're seeing: that is basically an AKM receiver in a sporter stock and it appears to have a scope that is attached with either rubber bands or electrical tape. For some reason, I'm guessing as a kind of rudimentary sun shade, there is a paper tube on Routh's scope which would crumple up against his eye if he actually fired it.

It takes you a second to grasp the full, almost monstrous stupidity of what you're seeing - at the front of the rifle, Routh appears to have built up a 'hump' of electrical tape on which the objective end of the scope rests. I'm honestly surprised he could even sight that in, because if you shoot it like that, I'm fairly confident the scope will fall off within a few shots, I can't imagine it would hold zero.

As suspected, this is a 7.62 x 39mm weapon which makes a shot at 400-500 yards unlikely bordering on implausible, especially with that scope setup. He would probably have been better off with iron sights quite frankly.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is why you wait for facts.

I'd hesitate to say "every time", but it seems like 99% of it, rushing to a conclusion that sounds cool for temporary clout is going to result in being wrong, publicly, and that is happening, right now, with all the conspiracy theorists who were breathlessly foaming at the mouth speculating a mere week ago.

Believe it or not, sometimes, random bad things just happen more intensely during a certain period of time, as an intended or, frequently, unintended consequence of people trying engineer some political effect by strategically riling people up. This is the nature of "stochastic" violence.

Jump to conclusions for clout and you end up looking like a charlatan and fool real easy, like a lot of people out there are right now - if they even understand, I suspect the liberal conspiracy theory crowd isn't exactly good at understanding firearms design, deployment scenarios & TTPs.

Yeah no that's the weapon your boy was gonna do a 500m sniper shot with lol

Right through the Secret Service bubble

Very plausible, what a great theory It's a common mistake in people who have never tried to understand guns; nobody ever realizes what a big deal scopes and scope mounts are

An easy rule of thumb in precision rifle shooting is, you spend as much as, if not more, on your scope than you do your rifle

And scope mounts are a huge deal. These are scope mounts from Spuhr, Larue and Nightforce, this would be what a knowledgeable private citizen shooter would use; I'm pretty sure the cheapest one is $250

Image 4 is a rail that goes on the top of the SKS and attaches to the front sight base, which is anchored to the front trunion, I believe, which makes it at least somewhat capable of holding zero

Any of these would at least be a plausible setup

What you're seeing from Routh is a jackass with a stunning level of ignorance of riflery

NAFO addresses a fundamental gap in information war defense strategy.

We know - as in, the newsreading public knows - that that Russian intelligence agencies are running influence ops that target American civilians. but there's no civilian response strategy.

1/6

---

Sources:

Collier, Kevin, "Russian propagandists are still targeting Americans in influence operations, Meta says", NBC News, Aug 18 2024

Kelley, Michael J., "Understanding Russian Disinformation and How the Joint Force Can Address It", May 29 2024

Myers, Steven Lee & Barnes, Julian E., "U.S. Investigating Americans Who Worked With Russian State Television", Aug 21 2024 nbcnews.com/tech/security/…
publications.armywarcollege.edu/News/Display/A…
archive.is/https://www.ny… Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and this is one such claim.

To be clear, I am asserting that:

1) America is in a social-media information war with Russia,

2) we are losing, insofar as that war has compromised at least one major political party in America to the point that one of its elected members has stated so publicly on live national TV (the House Intelligence Committee chair, actually) and

3) we need civilian digital movements (similar to NAFO, if not NAFO itself) as defensive countermeasures in order to not lose that information war

Such evidence is, luckily, not lacking with regard to Russian cyberwar & influence efforts targeting Americans, nor for NAFO efficacy at this point in 2024.

---

Sources:

Anonymous FBI Special Agent, "Affidavit in support of seizure warrant", United States of America v. Certain Domains, 2024,

Lotz, Avery, "House Intelligence Committee chair says Russian propaganda has spread through parts of GOP", CNN, Apr 7 2024


NAFO efficacy
1. Braun, Stuart, "Ukraine's info warriors battling Russian trolls", DW, Sep 17 2022,

2. McInnis, et al., "#NAFO and Winning the Information War: Lessons Learned from Ukraine", Center for Strategic & International Studies, Oct 5 2022,

3. Giles, Keir, "Humour in online information warfare: Case study on Russia’s war on Ukraine", NATO Hybrid Center of Excellence Working Paper No. 26, Nov 2023, p. 28, justice.gov/opa/media/1366…
cnn.com/2024/04/07/pol…
dw.com/en/nafo-ukrain…

hybridcoe.fi/wp-content/upl…

See, it's actually interesting that this guy wasn't in NAFO.

A lot of the people I follow and who follow me are NAFO fellas, so as a result, I have social graph connections to most people involved in Ukraine war activism.

But my only three mutuals with that guy were three journalists who followed him after he attempted to assassinate Trump.

Remember, we have open membership, all you need to do is donate to Ukraine. I've been cautioning people for a minute about this, just assume that NAFO is already infiltrated; it won't do them much good the way it's structured anyway.

This guy even replied to Karen Dotcom and Black in the Empire, like a lot of NAFO fellas did. Yet no social graph connections.

I chalk up the oddness of it all to, Routh simply sucked at social media - I mean, did you see his tweets - but it's interesting that he sucked so bad, spammed so much, and never seems to have come across NAFO
Here he is talking back to Karen Dotcom and Russian in the Black Empire or whatever

And still, no mutuals with that guy

We don't have enough data to construct an account of the Trump assassination attempt.

But, I think we have enough to shoot some of the wilder, stupider theories.

What I have is:

- social media profiles (before they were deleted, I have video recordings I'm using for screenshots)

- interview in New York Times in '23 ()

- thread talking about him as a frankly grifty, unstable-sounding "recruiter" with a cockamamie plan to get Afghan troops into Ukraine (, also get a lawyer, please)

- a fairly good picture of his gear including a medium/high confidence assessment of weapon platform ()

From this let's test out a few of the theories:nytimes.com/2023/03/25/wor…

https://x.com/v8mile/status/1804097069876916506

https://x.com/FluteMagician/status/1835448309105746117

It's almost trivially easy to rebut some of the conspiracy theories, actually, even at our current imperfect state of knowledge mere hours out- remember, we haven't heard from the guy yet, and he was taken into custody alive. But some of the facts, as currently known, give the lie to such theories.

Conspiracy theory 1: Professional sniper
Almost totally disproven by choice of weapon platform. Assume a 9-inch vital zone (head, or solar plexus/midsection). With a (generously) 2.5 MOA AK-platform Saiga or SKS with a "sporterized" stock chambered in 7.62, you're looking at 10 inch CEP at 400 yards and nearly 50 MOA of drop.

The inaccuracy is bad enough: you could be aimed dead center at the vital zone, mathematically perfectly, and the sheer inaccuracy of the rifle would make you miss.

The equipment makes it more implausible. Assuming he's using, say, a 3-9x scope (say, a Leupold VX-6 popular with the low-budget crowd). That scope has only 60 MOA of adjustment (30 up, 30 down). Really nice scopes have 50 MOA up, 50 MOA down or so, I doubt he has one of those.

So, unless he has a 30 MOA canted scope mount, he wouldn't even be able to dial in his elevation because, realistically, people aren't shooting 7.62 x 39 out to 400 yards, they use 7.62 x 54R rifles (e.g., SVD Dragunov.

You hit a 9-inch plate at 400m with an AK-platform weapon in 7.62 x 39 at the range, people will probably buy you a beer. It's not easy.

MAGAs hate 'Murder in Mississippi' (1965) by Norman Rockwell because they want to believe the lie in everything that Rockwell painted before.

It is difficult to see the beauty in it, as with all of Rockwell's post-propaganda period. It's easier to believe in the America of Rockwell's 1950s work, an America with clean people living lives of plenty, a kind of aesthetic cowardice that manifests in revisionist history for MAGA trash aesthetics ("trashthetics" if you prefer, which I don't).

The ugly truth behind the comforting pictures of white people who look like you is the same thing erased by the "Great Again" in MAGA, the same as it was during Lindbergh's racist "America First" campaign. It's based on systematic erasure of anything that interferes with a conveniently white, great American past.

The ugly truth is this, one of Rockwell's starkest images, painted in the period emerging after his awakening during the Civil Rights struggle.

Dennis Rafferty at describes the context as follows:

"The victims had been college students volunteering during a summer campaign in Mississippi to encourage black residents to register to vote. At that time, less than 10 percent of eligible blacks in Mississippi were registered, and now with the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act, striking down long-standing state “Jim Crow” laws prohibiting African Americans from voting, black voters for the first time had federal laws protecting these rights, which superseded and nullified previous state voting laws.

No longer having any legal means to prevent blacks from voting, local white racists now turned to an organized program of terror and intimidation to discourage African Americans exercising their new voting rights. To achieve these ends, the local sheriff’s office was clandestinely working closely with the Ku Klux Klan, who burnt the church hosting the summer voting rights campaign to the ground, an act intended to terrorize the liberal student activists that had descended on the town (a local newspaper described it as an “invasion” of unwelcome outsiders)."

Rockwell is in full mastery of his painterly powers, sharpened by advertising technique as well as a dialogue with a past unvarnished by masturbatory white supremacist myths. This is clearest in his similarities to Francisco Goya y Lucientes.

1/4livingchurch.org In The Third of May 1808, Goya solves similar problems to Rockwell's pencil sketches towards the full-sized version of this image.

The political similarities are fascinating; in Goya's case, his painting illustrates Spanish resistance to Napoleonic invasion.

Rather than making something intricate and detailed for a private patron, Goya makes something impactful, stark, even drastically simplified. The moment of the men in a Spanish village being collectively punished by the French for the actions of a sniper is reduced to a single flash, even a single color.

As with readings of Rockwell's Civil Rights work, it's easy for your average trashy fascist to dismiss it as victim-celebration, even celebrate the horrors it shows as if to intimidate the broader public in a show of collective sadism; and the answers are to that, I submit, are the same for us today as they were for mid-20th-century antifascist artists and theorists.

Search 'Norman Rockwell' today, you get mostly picturesque, clean, agreeable white Americans living clean, agreeable lives, 2.5 kids and a house with a white picket fence.

And then this: 'The Problem We All Live With', from 1964.

At first you don't see the beauty.
(🧵) Most of Rockwell's work is almost if not outright propagandistic.

I'd argue there's actually elements of fascism in there, like references to an always-receding glorious past and racial monotony so severe it looks like a satire today.

That changes in the early '60s.

Thread of actual quotes about Trump:

"Trump is a fucking moron." - Rex Tillerson, Trump's first Secretary of State

1/6 "Trump is an idiot, unhinged."

John F. Kelly, Trump's second White House chief of staff

2/6

I realized, Elon not only fired the compliance people at Twitter who dealt with the sanctions violations I found in '22, he doesn't even know how sanctions work himself and built a system that signs contracts with SDNs for blue-checks

So X is a massive sanctions violator SDN designations are they are used today are broadly speaking derived from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA

So, the IEEPA contains a specific exemption for cases like "what if Twitter gives Khameini an account"

This worked in '22

https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1745303290483798300

probably worth unpacking:

in '70 Mary Ainsworth at Johns Hopkins demonstrated four patterns of mother-child attachment when tested in the "strange situation" experiment where an infant is temporarily left alone with strangers

This is relevant to political behavior
1/10

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1829864971913871552

Attachment theory is useful both in decoding politicians and understanding voters because it

1) typifies people's reactions to their parents, which also shapes how they think about their romantic partners and their societies to an extent

2) it is unusually well-tested and valid

Let's try something different. There's 71 days until Nov 5.

I'm going to show you 71 beautiful things.

This is Delacroix "Liberty Leading the People", 1830.

Let me explain a couple things about why this painting is revolutionary.

1/ Today I showed close to a million people one of the ugliest paintings I've ever seen in my life, so this is probably a worthwhile exercise.

You might think because of Lena Rusleva that all Western political art is bad or propagandistic.

This is not true.

https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1827935431822114853